Award-winning poet and college professor Jeff Hardin holds an M.F.A in poetry from The University of Alabama. In addition to his four chapbooks, he has six collections of poetry: Fall Sanctuary, recipient of the Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press; Notes for a Praise Book, selected by Toi Derricotte and published by Jacar Press; Restoring the Narrative, which received the Donald Justice Poetry Prize; Small Revolution; No Other Kind of World, recipient of the X. J. Kennedy Prize; and A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being. His seventh book, Watermark, is forthcoming in April 2022; and his eighth, Strange Land, in late 2022. A widely published poet, his work has appeared in such renowned publications as The Southern Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, and many others. He is a professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN. He serves as an editor for the online journal One.
CHM: Jeff, first, thank you for sharing some of your time and ideas with Southern Literary Review. Now, before we dive into your poetry, let’s chat a moment about you as a person from the South. I understand you are born in Savannah, TN, (Hardin County), an eighth-generation descendant of the county’s founder. Yet, you say that you have not lived there since you were seventeen. What has your journey away from Hardin County been like? Can you imagine moving away from the South?
Jeff Hardin
JH: My journey began like many people’s journeys: I left home (for college) and never returned. I have lived in six cities in three states, but I have spent almost three decades now in Columbia, TN, about a hundred miles from my hometown. My grandmother once said, “You can make a home anywhere,” and I have found her advice to be true because miraculous people live everywhere.
The older I get (and maybe I’ve always felt this way) the more I consider myself, quite simply, a soul. I am only passing through. I have no allegiance to a specific place even as I treasure many specific places. I have no allegiance to a nation even as I love my nation. In other words, I don’t feel the need to elevate one place (or its people) above another; instead, I prefer to imagine the mystery and amazement that might accompany me had I lived any place other than where I’ve spent my life. As Jane Kenyon says, in another context, “It might have been otherwise,” and I repeat her line with a sense of humility, wonder, and enchantment.
CHM: You write a poem every day, or that’s what I read. Might you share your process for writing and revising? How do you decide what to submit and what to keep to yourself?
JH: I scribble a new poem each morning in the early hours. I enjoy finding whatever new mind the day’s language reveals. A poem renews the mind. A poem creates a mind with which to encounter the day’s unveilings. I don’t think about publication or an audience or anything other than what emerges on the page. I write in journals of different sizes, convincing myself that the size or shape of a page might influence what kind of poem appears. I say “appears” because that’s how the process seems to me. I have the sense that I am languageless and that I have to find a way to pull language into myself, or I have to discover words as if I’ve never encountered them before. I have the sense that out of non-existence some part of existence will be revealed to me. I know these decades of poems have come from my own mind, but I make no claims about understanding how or why. Reading my poems, I often feel as if I’m standing outside my life and mind. I find poems in long-ago journals, and some of them strike me as other-minded, a space of language that couldn’t possibly be attributed to my typical way of thinking.
Almost nothing I’ve written in the last twelve years has appeared in a book. My newest book, Watermark, began in 2004 and was completed, for the most part, in 2009. I’m not sure what to make of my process except to say that most of my books seem to be on about a decade delay. As for submitting work, I find less and less motivation to do so. I have thousands and thousands of poems, so deciding what to submit sometimes feels overwhelming, so I just end up working on a new poem, narrowing my focus to its discoveries.
CHM: Weaving your life and poetry together, what have your sanctuaries and major influences been and how have they impacted your poetry?
JH: Each day’s answer to this question would be an entirely new answer. I used to find sanctuary in the loft of my papaw’s barn, tucking myself back inside an interiority between hay bales. I used to find sanctuary alongside a creek’s sandbar where I stalked the shallows, searching for arrowheads or fossils. I used to find sanctuary in one of the three magnolia trees in the central yard of my childhood. Later, I found sanctuary in Psalm 40 and then in U2’s song “Scarlet” where Bono stretches out the song’s only word—“Rejoice”—for nine full seconds, and I wanted to stretch that word out to cover my whole life. I found sanctuary in thousands and thousands of lines of poems by Stafford, Kenyon, Milosz, Szymborska, Transtromer, Issa, Amichai, Heaney, Gregg, Ritsos and countless others.
CHM: In reading through some selections of your poems, I am intrigued by the range of topics and styles. From the gentle, accessible poem about boyhood friends in “Toward a Place,” for example, to “Infinity Getting Fainter on All the Radar Screens,” with its impressive opening line of “Ontologically Kafkaesque would not be my description / of the moment’s build.” Is there a method to your madness in creating poems with such diverse range of themes and styles?
JH: Some species of butterfly look through eyes that have more than six thousand facets, some even through seventeen thousand facets. How multiple and abundant existence must be! I am always searching for a new way to write a poem that doesn’t quite seem like looking through the same lens as before. I published a book of sonnets years ago, and I love the sonnet form both as a reader and as a poet, but I would not wish to limit my mind to the lens of a sonnet since—even as various as a sonnet can be—it is but one facet of looking out upon existence. Each poem is a new facet. I am forever experimenting, seeking a new sound, shape, or understanding of what a poem can be or look like. Turn of the century baseball player Wee Willie Keeler (1892-1910) notably said, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t,” so maybe I’m trying to do something similar with poems—trying to create a poem I’ve never seen before. Lofty goal: daily failures. Even so, I’m having so much fun.
My sixth book, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, came about when I stumbled onto a “shape” where each stanza, coming to a close, ended not at the end of a line but with two or three words “left over” on the line below. I found myself dropping the next line’s thought and then ending that line with a word that was the opposite of the word concluding the previous thought. Watermark plays around with a visible and vertical phrase down the left-hand margin through which I keep realigning my thinking. Some of these phrases are among the most central of my life: Rilke’s “You must change your life,” Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody who are You,” Frost’s “I have promises to keep,” U2’s “one life with each other,” and others.
Claire Matturro
One of the poems you mention, “Infinity Getting Fainter on All the Radar Screens,” is one of hundreds of ten-line aphorism poems I’ve written. Each poem has four “movements,” beginning with three three-line stanzas separated by asterisks, each stanza a self-contained section, followed by a single line. 3-3-3-1. In some ways the shape might mirror a sonnet except that I’m working with the interplay and juxtapositions of aphorisms. Readers might disagree, but I enjoy the swerves of mind that come about when these aphorisms are thrown into the same space.
CHM: Despite your broad range, I often note themes and images of nature, creeks, and of a rural youth. Would you address the impact of a childhood spent more in the countryside and woods than in a city and the effect this has had upon your writing and your outlook?
JH: The implications of this question seem endless to me. Here are a few quick responses. I waded in creeks, crawled through caves, studied animal tracks, sat on the roots of beech trees, collected fossils and arrowheads, and wandered as if time didn’t exist. I was learning how to pay attention (both practically and reverently) but also how to be a small presence in the midst of a vast indifference. I was learning what little disturbance I had upon my surroundings. I was waking “to the mystery that’s all-surrounding,” as one of my poems says. I was learning how “to listen to my own listening / listening out past what the mind can believe.” I was learning “a daily preparation / for when the body turns / to spirit,” and I was learning how “to balance joy against the constant / question / of when I’ll cease to be.” I think I was already thinking about how whatever I was doing, whoever I was becoming, would one day be only a memory, and not even my own memory but someone else’s, and even that future memory, too, would already be slipping away, if not already vanished from the landscape.
CHM: In reading through some selections of your poems, I am intrigued by the range of topics and styles. From the gentle, accessible poem about boyhood friends in “Toward a Place,” for example, to “Infinity Getting Fainter on All the Radar Screens,” with its impressive opening line of “Ontologically Kafkaesque would not be my description / of the moment’s build.” Is there a method to your madness in creating poems with such diverse range of themes and styles?
JH: Some species of butterfly look through eyes that have more than six thousand facets, some even through seventeen thousand facets. How multiple and abundant existence must be! I am always searching for a new way to write a poem that doesn’t quite seem like looking through the same lens as before. I published a book of sonnets years ago, and I love the sonnet form both as a reader and as a poet, but I would not wish to limit my mind to the lens of a sonnet since—even as various as a sonnet can be—it is but one facet of looking out upon existence. Each poem is a new facet. I am forever experimenting, seeking a new sound, shape, or understanding of what a poem can be or look like. Turn of the century baseball player Wee Willie Keeler (1892-1910) notably said, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t,” so maybe I’m trying to do something similar with poems—trying to create a poem I’ve never seen before. Lofty goal: daily failures. Even so, I’m having so much fun.
My sixth book, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, came about when I stumbled onto a “shape” where each stanza, coming to a close, ended not at the end of a line but with two or three words “left over” on the line below. I found myself dropping the next line’s thought and then ending that line with a word that was the opposite of the word concluding the previous thought. Watermark plays around with a visible and vertical phrase down the left-hand margin through which I keep realigning my thinking. Some of these phrases are among the most central of my life: Rilke’s “You must change your life,” Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody who are You,” Frost’s “I have promises to keep,” U2’s “one life with each other,” and others.
One of the poems you mention, “Infinity Getting Fainter on All the Radar Screens,” is one of hundreds of ten-line aphorism poems I’ve written. Each poem has four “movements,” beginning with three three-line stanzas separated by asterisks, each stanza a self-contained section, followed by a single line. 3-3-3-1. In some ways the shape might mirror a sonnet except that I’m working with the interplay and juxtapositions of aphorisms. Readers might disagree, but I enjoy the swerves of mind that come about when these aphorisms are thrown into the same space.
CHM: Despite your broad range, I often note themes and images of nature, creeks, and of a rural youth. Would you address the impact of a childhood spent more in the countryside and woods than in a city and the effect this has had upon your writing and your outlook?
JH: The implications of this question seem endless to me. Here are a few quick responses. I waded in creeks, crawled through caves, studied animal tracks, sat on the roots of beech trees, collected fossils and arrowheads, and wandered as if time didn’t exist. I was learning how to pay attention (both practically and reverently) but also how to be a small presence in the midst of a vast indifference. I was learning what little disturbance I had upon my surroundings. I was waking “to the mystery that’s all-surrounding,” as one of my poems says. I was learning how “to listen to my own listening / listening out past what the mind can believe.” I was learning “a daily preparation / for when the body turns / to spirit,” and I was learning how “to balance joy against the constant / question / of when I’ll cease to be.” I think I was already thinking about how whatever I was doing, whoever I was becoming, would one day be only a memory, and not even my own memory but someone else’s, and even that future memory, too, would already be slipping away, if not already vanished from the landscape.
CHM: In reading through some selections of your poems, I am intrigued by the range of topics and styles. From the gentle, accessible poem about boyhood friends in “Toward a Place,” for example, to “Infinity Getting Fainter on All the Radar Screens,” with its impressive opening line of “Ontologically Kafkaesque would not be my description / of the moment’s build.” Is there a method to your madness in creating poems with such diverse range of themes and styles?
JH: Some species of butterfly look through eyes that have more than six thousand facets, some even through seventeen thousand facets. How multiple and abundant existence must be! I am always searching for a new way to write a poem that doesn’t quite seem like looking through the same lens as before. I published a book of sonnets years ago, and I love the sonnet form both as a reader and as a poet, but I would not wish to limit my mind to the lens of a sonnet since—even as various as a sonnet can be—it is but one facet of looking out upon existence. Each poem is a new facet. I am forever experimenting, seeking a new sound, shape, or understanding of what a poem can be or look like. Turn of the century baseball player Wee Willie Keeler (1892-1910) notably said, “Hit ‘em where they ain’t,” so maybe I’m trying to do something similar with poems—trying to create a poem I’ve never seen before. Lofty goal: daily failures. Even so, I’m having so much fun.
My sixth book, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, came about when I stumbled onto a “shape” where each stanza, coming to a close, ended not at the end of a line but with two or three words “left over” on the line below. I found myself dropping the next line’s thought and then ending that line with a word that was the opposite of the word concluding the previous thought. Watermark plays around with a visible and vertical phrase down the left-hand margin through which I keep realigning my thinking. Some of these phrases are among the most central of my life: Rilke’s “You must change your life,” Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody who are You,” Frost’s “I have promises to keep,” U2’s “one life with each other,” and others.
One of the poems you mention, “Infinity Getting Fainter on All the Radar Screens,” is one of hundreds of ten-line aphorism poems I’ve written. Each poem has four “movements,” beginning with three three-line stanzas separated by asterisks, each stanza a self-contained section, followed by a single line. 3-3-3-1. In some ways the shape might mirror a sonnet except that I’m working with the interplay and juxtapositions of aphorisms. Readers might disagree, but I enjoy the swerves of mind that come about when these aphorisms are thrown into the same space.
CHM: Despite your broad range, I often note themes and images of nature, creeks, and of a rural youth. Would you address the impact of a childhood spent more in the countryside and woods than in a city and the effect this has had upon your writing and your outlook?
JH: The implications of this question seem endless to me. Here are a few quick responses. I waded in creeks, crawled through caves, studied animal tracks, sat on the roots of beech trees, collected fossils and arrowheads, and wandered as if time didn’t exist. I was learning how to pay attention (both practically and reverently) but also how to be a small presence in the midst of a vast indifference. I was learning what little disturbance I had upon my surroundings. I was waking “to the mystery that’s all-surrounding,” as one of my poems says. I was learning how “to listen to my own listening / listening out past what the mind can believe.” I was learning “a daily preparation / for when the body turns / to spirit,” and I was learning how “to balance joy against the constant / question / of when I’ll cease to be.” I think I was already thinking about how whatever I was doing, whoever I was becoming, would one day be only a memory, and not even my own memory but someone else’s, and even that future memory, too, would already be slipping away, if not already vanished from the landscape.
CHM: Jeff, you have a lovely tribute in a blog at your website to Dave Etter, the Spring 1987 visiting poet at Austin Peay State University, where you were a student and studied with Etter. And you and I spoke briefly about a poetry professor, Thomas Rabbitt, we both had classes with at The University of Alabama (though I hasten to add I was there well before you were). These references make me wonder when and how you discovered the poetry inside you. Did you write poetry as a youth, or did Etter open that door for you? Who else might have helped you to develop and nurture that talent?
JH: I began writing seriously in the ninth grade, and my earliest poems were a direct result of the limited reading available to me in Savannah, TN. I like to joke that my earliest poems resembled discarded Duran Duran lyrics. Arriving at APSU in 1986 opened my eyes to a much wider range of what poetry might look like or sound like. I discovered poets who were writing and publishing in real time: Albert Goldbarth, Philip St. Clair, Chase Twichell, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Stafford, William Kloefkorn, Richard Jackson, Amy Clampitt, and so many others.
Your reference to Dave Etter is part of a series of blog posts I’ve been writing in order to honor poets with whom I’ve crossed paths. So far I’ve also written about Toi Derricotte and George Scarbrough. The single greatest influence on my poetry, though, would be one of my first teachers, David Till, co-founder of Zone 3. Till remains one of the best “readers” of poetry I’ve encountered. I sometimes still “hear” his voice coming through the words on a page, and when I think through a poem’s purposes, I try to match the studied intelligence and affectionate tenderness (and fierceness) he brought to the reading of a poem.
CHM: I see that among your many accolades and awards that you are the recipient of the prestigious Donald Justice Poetry Prize in 2015 for Restoring the Narrative. Justice is one of my favorite poets, and I remain enthralled by his sestinas and villanelles, which I found to be among the most vexing of poems to write but among the most delightful to read. Which leads me to ask: have you written any sestinas or villanelles? If so, how did you find writing those to be compared to free verse or other formats? And how did winning such a prestigious award impact you?
JH: I have written a handful of villanelles, but none of them have appeared in print, but that’s true of more than five thousand other poems I’ve written through the years.
Receiving the Donald Justice Prize was a shock, particularly because some of Justice’s poems are central to my reading life, including “Thinking about the Past,” “The Evening of the Mind,” “Invitation to a Ghost,” “Sadness,” “At the Young Composers’ Concert,” and “There is a gold light in certain old paintings.”
Everything about that prize is connected to Wil Mills, my best poet-friend, who died in 2011. Wil was the one who drug my free-verse mind toward writing sonnets more than two decades ago. Wil was the one who challenged my process-oriented writing life to move more toward well-crafted poems. The title poem of Restoring the Narrative, one of Wil’s favorites, was dedicated to him, appearing in Measure with his own work shortly after his death in 2011. Restoring the Narrative is dedicated to Wil and our twenty-one-year fellowship.
CHM: And now, Jeff, finally, let’s talk about Watermark: Poems (Madville Publishing, April 2022), your newest collection of poetry. This collection contains poems that reflect a style you created, which you call “watermark,” and in which you stitch your stanzas back through a visible and vertical phrase, what you’ve called a “whispered prayer, so to speak, behind the poem.” Can you explain this a bit further, and also tell us where the idea or inspiration for such a form came from? Perhaps you might share an example?
JH: Almost two decades ago while sitting in Buckhead Coffeehouse in Columbia, TN, with my poet-friend Michelle Hendrixson Miller, I told her I had an idea: I could take old phrases from failed poems and make them the titles of new poems. I wrote “How Quiet Must I Be” at the top of a page, and then, just as suddenly—because I also have a math mind—I saw the line along a horizontal and vertical axis. I wondered what the words would look like vertical, so I spaced them down the left-hand margin and then wrote a poem whose stanzas were also a sort of math formula: a staggered two-line stanza followed by a three line stanza followed by one longer line stitching back through each word of this “whispered prayer” back behind the poem.
I thought of Rilke’s “You must change your life” and Frost’s “I have promises to keep,” among others. Soon, I made a list of 50-60 central lines that were part of my mental DNA. I have spoken before about how I believe we are descendants of language, that the words we take to ourselves shape who we are and how we approach the world. Would I be a poet if I had not read the Psalms as a child or Wordsworth as a sixth grader? These central lines of my life could serve as a “whispered prayer,” one to which I could anchor my thoughts. I also felt like I could roam far and wide in my thinking while continually aligning or re-aligning my thoughts. I could not only honor lines by Dickinson (“Faith is a fine invention”), Hopkins (“Dearest freshness deep down things”), Bishop (“practice losing farther losing faster”), and so many others, but I could also recognize how easily I might never have found such language to begin with.
Ultimately, writing Watermark was born out of gratitude. In a world where so much language is not holy or sanctified—not a refuge in which my spirit finds respite—I wanted to write poems born out my own personal hymn book of words (U2’s “one life with each other,” for example). I wanted to bear witness to the unlikeliness of anyone’s life, to behold how we might still be worded, spoken into existence, and we might then learn how to speak a language in which sometimes each word, astounding in implications, becomes its own epiphany.
CHM: Thank Jeff Hardin, once again, for sharing with Southern Literary Review.
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